OpenOffice is one of the best reviewed and the oldest in the family of productivity software suites. It takes care of all the typical office needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. The software is available for all possible operating systems and in many languages. It can open & save your files to an international open standard format and to many additional formats common to other office software packages as well. The best thing about OpenOffice? It can be downloaded and used for any purpose completely free!
UPDATE: After 300,000,000 downloads, the newest version of Open Office (3.2) is out and among others, includes these great improvements:
– faster start up times
– ODF support
– proprietary file support
– cell borders support for multiple selection in Calc
– better sort in Calc
– complex copy & paste in Calc
– comments functionality in Draw
OpenOffice is one of the best in the open source group. Developed as one piece of software (not several applications bundled together) over the past twenty years, it’s very stable, flexible & intuitive. Every year thousands of people contribute to making it even better by reporting and fixing bugs, suggesting or coding new features and translating it to even more languages. OpenOffice is every easy to learn both for beginner and advanced users. It has also been proven that it’s actually easier (and way cheaper!) to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice 3 than to Microsoft’s newest Office 2007 (which I can attest to myself!).
The newest version of OpenOffice includes some improvements in the screen appearance, easier drag&drop, improved file locking and text overlining (underlining on top of the text!). The Writer part of the software got some new subtle highlighting capabilities and better grammar-checker integration and the Chart now lets you pick how to handle missing data while drawing graphs – and that’s just a few of the improvements.
OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL license, which means you can download and use it absolutely free, forever, for any purpose – private, educational or commercial. You are even encouraged burn copies and give them out to all your friends, family and coworkers – the more people know about it and use the software – the better.
Related Links:
OpenOffice Website
